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This land is your land -- except Newcomb Boulevard: Jarvis DeBerry

Newcomb Boulevard gate

Robert Frost said "Good fences make good neighbors" but not everyone agrees, especially when it comes to the fence installed in 2006 that blocks vehicular traffic from going down Newcomb Blvd. from Freret Street on Saturday, November 26, 2011. (Photo by Michael DeMocker, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune archive)

The city will only gain from this transaction..." -- Newcomb Boulevard Association president on his group's proposal to buy the public street

My wife doesn't like it when other people park directly in front of our house. My typical response is a shrug. We don't own the street, I say. It's public property. As long as they're not blocking our driveway, other folks can park wherever they'd like.

As you can tell by that exchange, we don't live on Newcomb Boulevard, a stretch of public property in Uptown New Orleans that was blocked off from public access by muckety-mucks who used to lived there and is being treated like private property by the muckety-mucks who still do.

"Our goal is to keep Newcomb Boulevard the way it is now and has been for the past eight years and we are offering to purchase the street from the City at fair market value and assume future maintenance costs," Christian Rooney, president of the Newcomb Boulevard Association, wrote in an emailed statement. "The city will only gain from this transaction: the purchase price, property tax collection, and forgone maintenance expenses."

No the city won't gain. The city will lose. Not only would it be losing a part of itself. It would also be losing a key characteristic of city life: the idea that we can all coexist as neighbors, that we can't wall ourselves away from the people just because we can.

Disputing opponents' claims that by gating off their street the Newcomb folks have disrupted the flow of traffic, Rooney says the street in dispute is "a single block over a quarter of a mile in length, the equivalent of four blocks, without a single intersection."

The street I live on is even shorter and there aren't any intersections there to contend with either. But somehow claiming the street as my own private property never entered my mind.